MasterCard has announced the availability of M/Chip Advance, a payment platform takes traditional debit, credit and prepaid chip cards to the next level by advancing payment functionality, facilitating deployment of contactless applications and integrating information needed for business applications such as transit and loyalty. The result according to MasterCard: "the potential to deliver versatile, multi-functional payment capabilities to consumers on one payment card." READ MORE

Aconite has announced that it will collaborate with Ecebs Limited to develop and deliver a smart card that combines transport ticketing and payment capabilities with other services. According to the company, "he combination of Aconite’s back-office smart card administration and transaction processing software with Ecebs’ software for developing on-card applications will provide a unique end-to-end solution for managing smart card products, individual smart cards and their applications." READ MORE

Gemalto has launched the world’s first bio-sourced degradable smart cards. According to the company, "the card body is made from renewable material, is easily recyclable and compostable, and can be incinerated without emissions of toxic fumes. Additionally, Gemalto offers packaging made from recycled paper and vegetable inks that significantly reduce the product’s environmental impact. Gemalto’s bio-sourced smart cards will be ready for mass production in the first quarter of 2010." READ MORE

New findings announced by Moneris Solutions, Canada's largest payment processor, reveal that "merchants who process chip card transactions are experiencing fewer chargebacks than ever before due to increased security and fraud detection. This is the first data of its kind from Canada and demonstrates that chip cards reduce fraud and chargebacks." READ MORE

DeviceFidelity has announced the availability of In2Pay, a microSD-based solution that "transforms any mobile phone with an available memory card slot into an interactive contactless transaction device. Compatible with near field communication (NFC) technology, In2Pay is now available for trials with banks, wireless carriers and payment networks, with volume production for commercial deployments in 2010. DeviceFidelity has signed evaluation agreements with some of the largest card issuers in the U.S. and will be demonstrating In2Pay at Cartes 2009." READ MORE

INSIDE Contactless has announced that it is providing critical infrastructure components to Taggo, a membership card aggregator and storefront, for the new service Taggo will launch in Singapore and other parts of South East Asia early next year. Using ID stickers based on INSIDE's PicoPass(r) 2KS contactless memory chip, contactless readers based on INSIDE's M210-2G proximity coupler and INSIDE's integration and adoption services, Taggo has developed a way for mobile phone stickers to replace plastic loyalty and membership cards from a variety of retail merchants. READ MORE

Oberthur Technologies has announced Smart Lumiere, a light-emitting contactless card that emits light when it is entered in the field of a contactless reader to inform the cardholder when a transaction is taking place. READ MORE

We recently had an email from a long-time Visa colleague of ours that brought back memories of some of the early work that Visa did on smart cards back in the late 1980's-early 1990's. The most famous of those was the Visa Super Smart Card.

Paul Steger runs a web site that collects lots of information about Visa (and Mondex) smart cards - for us that's like a trip down memory lane!

The Smart Card Alliance has released a new white paper titled "Fraud in the U.S. Payments Industry: Fraud Mitigation and Prevention Measures in Use and Chip Card Technology Impact on Fraud" developed by its Contactless and Mobile Payments Council.

"Criminals are known to exploit the weakest link in a payments infrastructure. With issuers in the rest of the world moving to EMV, it is likely that criminals are going to move counterfeit card activities to the U.S., attacking both U.S. and international issuers," said Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance. "If the United States wants to avoid an incoming tide of higher loss, the industry must be willing and able to make investments in emerging technologies." READ MORE

QSecure has announced it has received $10 Million in Series D funding from Worldview Technology Partners, Allegis Capital, UMC Capital, and Société Générale to continue development of its powered payment card technologies. READ MORE

In an article titled "For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad", Michelle Higgins writes for the New York Times about how US-issued magnetic stripe credit cards lack a chip that is increasingly required at unattended POS locations in countries overseas. Higgins writes that "as more countries around the world move to chip-and-PIN cards, it’s inevitable that Americans will encounter more difficulties paying for things abroad."

Dynamics Inc., a provider of next-generation payment cards, has announced that it has closed an initial $5.7 million Series A round of financing led by Adams Capital Management. Joel Adams, founder and general partner of Adams Capital Management, is joining the Dynamics Inc. board of directors.

Dynamics produces "a paper-thin, flexible computer platform that can be utilized in a variety of applications such as next-generation payment cards. Dynamics has invented the world's first fully programmable magnetic stripe that can be read at any existing Point-of-Sale (POS) magnetic stripe reader. The card itself can change any bit of information on this programmable stripe at any given time. The technology does not require any change to the 60 million 1970s-era magnetic stripe readers or re-education of its merchant base." READ MORE

The Smart Card Alliance has published a new position paper titled “End-to-End Encryption and Chip Cards in the U.S. Payments Industry" that "proposes an alternative to end-to-end encryption, protecting cardholder data by using chip card technology, but in a different way than has been considered in the past."

Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance, said "In our paper we discuss a different approach optimized for the U.S. payment market: using contactless chip cards, including a dynamic cryptogram with each transaction and authorizing transactions online. This stands in sharp contrast to previous considerations of implementing 'chip and PIN' based on the full EMV standard. Instead, this proposal builds on what is already happening in the U.S. -- the issuance and merchant acceptance of contactless cards -- while keeping in step with globally interoperable EMV standards." READ MORE

INSIDE Contactless and Cryptography Research have announced an agreement regarding the use of CRI’s patents covering countermeasures to Differential Power Analysis (DPA) and related attacks for INSIDE’s MicroPass and other secure semiconductor products. Under the agreement, INSIDE may use CRI's patents as part of the security strategy for its contactless semiconductor products which are used around the world in a variety of form factors – including contactless cards, key fobs, mobile payment bridge products, and NFC secure elements for mobile phones – for use in applications such as contactless payment, loyalty, identification, transit and access control. READ MORE

In an article titled "U.S. magnetic stripe credit cards on brink of extinction?", Beverly Harzog writes for CreditCards.com about the potential effects of a ban on mag stripe cards being considered by the European Payments Council.

Harzog takes a comprehensive look at the implications of such a move on US card issuers and their cardholders traveling to Europe - as well as exploring whether the US will eventually need to move from mag stripe-based cards to the Chip and PIN technology deployed in Europe and, increasingly, in other markets around the world.

U.S. Bank has announced that it is "the first card issuer in the United States to add Visa payWave technology to an unembossed debit card that is issued instantly to an account holder upon opening an account. The instant-issue Visa payWave pilot is being tested at select U.S. Bank branches in Denver and Salt Lake City as part of U.S. Bank’s on-going innovation in payments." READ MORE

In an article titled "Brigham Young University to test new NFC microSD solution", Sarah Clark writes for Near-Field Communications World about RFinity, an Idaho Falls-based startup that has developed technology to use an NFC application embedded in a microSD card that "enables a secure one-time token to be generated each time a transaction takes place and ensures that a user's credit card details never need to be transmitted, even in an encrypted form."

Canada's Interac Association has announced a partnership with INSIDE Contactless, the world leader in open-standard contactless chip technologies to develop chips containing the specifications for INTERAC’s contactless payment service. According to the companies, this partnership will enable Interac Association and its members to offer their debit card users a “next generation” retail payments solution. READ MORE

The Smart Payment Association (SPA), a group of the industry's largest manufacturers of payment smart cards, has announced findings from its 2008 market monitoring activity - undertaken in order to get a better understanding of the current status of the payment smart card market and its key trends.

"A lot of industries were severely affected by the financial crisis. Despite a slowdown in the SPA payment smart card shipments at the end of 2008, the smart card manufacturers are not as heavily impacted as others can be", said Marie-Jane Denis, President of the Smart Payment Association. "High volumes continue to be shipped around the world and a majority of regions carry on their migration to EMV standards." READ MORE

Slate's Big Money features a visual history of the credit card - starting all the way back with the Diners Club Card in 1951. [Hat tip: American Banker's BankThink blog].

EMVCo, the EMV standards body jointly owned by American Express, JCB, MasterCard and Visa, has announced that it will host an inaugural EMV User Meeting on 30 June-1 July 2009, at the Sheraton Arabellapark in Munich, Germany. Users of the EMV Specifications from across the world are invited to attend the meeting, and participate in technical discussions on the development of the EMV standard for future contact, contactless and mobile payments. READ MORE

NXP and Giesecke & Devrient have announced the introduction of NXP’s new Fast Pay contactless security chip and a new line of G&D contactless payment devices based on this IC. According to the two companies, "Fast Pay-based devices have been specifically designed to provide consumers in the USA and Canada with a convenient and swift contactless payment solution – replacing the need for cash and reducing transaction times." READ MORE

MasterCard Worldwide has announced the issuance of the 50 millionth MasterCard PayPass card or device. In the last year, the number of PayPass cards and devices more than doubled. According to MasterCard, "this significant PayPass momentum demonstrates not only the demand for simple solutions when it comes to payments, but also the continued secular shift toward electronic payments as validated by recent data1 that indicates 41 percent of consumers use cash less often today than they did two years ago." READ MORE

GlobalPlatform, the international specification body for smart card infrastructure, has announced that PayPal has become its latest member. According to the organization, "PayPal, the leading global online payments service, will bring its expertise to GlobalPlatform and contribute to the ongoing development of standards to ensure interoperability across the payments industry." READ MORE

ViVOtech has announced that it has closed an $8.6m extension to its Series C round of funding from its existing investors, bringing the total investment in its series C round to more than $40m. Separately, the company also announced that it has been awarded a key NFC-related software patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Patent number 7,469,151 was awarded on December 23rd 2008 and covers" a broad range of methods, systems and products for over the air (OTA) provisioning of credit, debit, prepaid, loyalty and other payment or non-payment cards into mobile phone devices through wireless networks or the internet." READ MORE

CGAP has published a white paper titled "Going Cashless at the Point of Sale: Hits and Misses in Developed Countries" by Ignacio Mas and Sarah Rotman. The paper explores a number of payment systems that have been tried and failed vs. those that have achieved some level of success. Includes discussion of Mondex, Octopus, Mobipay (Spain), Moneta (Korea), Simpay (Europe), and Osaifu-Keitai (Japan).

Moversa, a joint venture between NXP and Sony Corporation, has announced it will unveil its latest security chip – the Universal Secure Access Module (U-SAM) – at this year’s Mobile World Congress (16-19 February in Barcelona, Spain). According to the company, "the chip manages contactless smart card applications, regardless of protocols and operating systems, in Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled mobile devices. The potential of the U-SAM will be showcased on the NTT DOCOMO stand (Stand B117, Hall 8) in a demonstration featuring how multiple applications based on different contactless technologies, can be accessed on one mobile handset." READ MORE

EMVCo, the EMV standards body jointly owned by JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide and Visa Inc., has announced American Express as its fourth owner-member. According to the organization, "the addition of this latest international payment organisation aligns with EMVCo’s intent to attract further industry participation in the development of the EMV Specifications." READ MORE

Travis Pantin writes for The National that the Central Bank of Abu Dhabi has issued a statement requiring banks to introduce chip and PIN technology on their cards.

Steve Klebe writes:

I predict that when President-elect Obama is replaced by the next president in 2017 that will still be the case [we'll still be using mag stripe cards], albeit waning by that time. What do you think? Will we finally be issuing Chip Cards? Will it be RFID? Will it all be replaced by our mobile phones acting as payment cards or devices?